Henry Hill has an interesting CAPX piece about the bungling which is Labour housing policy.
Labour are peddling the same old myths about housing
Before last year’s election, I really thought Keir Starmer might go big on housing. A Labour government with a big majority could scorn the howling of Conservative and Liberal Democrat backbenchers and drive through development where it’s desperately needed: Britain’s commuter belts.
It did not take long for the shine to start coming off that naïve optimism. In the run-up to polling day, I wrote here about the uninspiring bureaucratic reality that lay beneath Labour’s rhetoric about new towns and the ‘grey belt’. When no planning bill made it into Starmer’s first King’s Speech, I suggested it might end up being the moment his government failed.
The final paragraph of Hill's piece is no surprise but worth noting too.
Somebody once described the Starmer Government to me as ‘the closest we have ever come to direct rule by the Civil Service’. That might, at this point, be a slur on civil servants. But it is without doubt a government betting the house on doing the same things we’ve been doing for decades, even as that house collapses around all of our ears.
Labour are peddling the same old myths about housing
- 'Land banking' has become the fairy-tale baddie of the housing crisis
- Labour's 'use-it-or-lose-it' approach to planning reform will drive up prices
- The Government is using the same bad ideas that have been around for decades
Before last year’s election, I really thought Keir Starmer might go big on housing. A Labour government with a big majority could scorn the howling of Conservative and Liberal Democrat backbenchers and drive through development where it’s desperately needed: Britain’s commuter belts.
It did not take long for the shine to start coming off that naïve optimism. In the run-up to polling day, I wrote here about the uninspiring bureaucratic reality that lay beneath Labour’s rhetoric about new towns and the ‘grey belt’. When no planning bill made it into Starmer’s first King’s Speech, I suggested it might end up being the moment his government failed.
The whole piece is well worth reading, including this government report on the various issues connected with housebuilding -
Planning
34. A prior condition for building houses is having permission to build them. We have
found that the planning system is exerting a significant downward pressure on the
overall number of planning permissions being granted across Great Britain. Over
the long-term, the number of permissions being given has been insufficient to
support housebuilding at the level required to meet government targets and
measures of assessed need.
The final paragraph of Hill's piece is no surprise but worth noting too.
Somebody once described the Starmer Government to me as ‘the closest we have ever come to direct rule by the Civil Service’. That might, at this point, be a slur on civil servants. But it is without doubt a government betting the house on doing the same things we’ve been doing for decades, even as that house collapses around all of our ears.
11 comments:
This fixation on planning permission is daft, and shows a complete lack of understanding of the issue. While important, it's only a small part of the problem.
Do these people have any idea of the number of other hoops you have to jump through - apart from and additional to planning permission - before you can actually build anything? Short answer - no.
They should go and work in the industry for a while, it would be an eye-opener.
They should go and work for a while, it would be an eye-opener.
I suspect that there are Labour MPs who have worked less in their whole lives that I worked in my school summer holidays.
Peter - I'm an outsider but yes, from what I see there are numerous hoops builders have to jump through as well as the planning. Critics often focus on planning though, presumably because that's seen as the starting point and they are making a point for outsiders.
dearieme - that seems to be a major problem and as we know, even if they have worked they aren't honest about what they did.
Surkier and his mate Angela have no problem putting together "property portfolios", so in their experience there is no home crisis.
Ditto for the "immigration crisis".
Ditto for sexual abuse of minors. Energy costs, inflation, and on and on and on.
Yes Reeves was a Bank of England economist and Reynolds an Edinburgh lawyer!
"Use it or lose it" is clearly based on the idea that the state owns everything, and it is on loan to private individuals and companies.
I'm not saying it's the thin end of the wedge, but I'm going to make sure I run the car round the block every week.
Doonhamer - yes it's a large part of the problem, they are never likely to be materially affected by their bungling or their lack of a moral compass.
Tammly - so much expertise and experience, we should be grateful.
Sam - make sure you take the dogs too, just in case.
I know about immigration etc but I still find it hard to believe we need so many houses. Around Crewe, Newcastle-under -Lyme, Congleton, Nantwich, Stoke and all villages around day after day I see news in the press of yet more estates of houses to be built. Driving around I see fields full of new houses recently built or now under construction. Not little closes or 'grey' sites that were pubs or garages (plenty of those too, our small village has doubled in the last decade) but huge open field sites with literally hundreds of new houses on each. The plan I saw yesterday was over 500 on one development. Yet very few affordable to first time local young families. Where on earth are all the people coming from who are buying these houses? And with the falling birth rate who will want them in a generation's time?
Woodsy - we see lots of house building here in Derbyshire too, from a few houses here and there to huge new estates. There appear to be a number of drivers, immigration being a big one, but it's an interesting issue we don't hear much about apart from the immigration and the opposition to so much new building. Maybe part of it is people moving out of cities, I don't know.
"people moving out of cities," The American term is blunt: "white flight".
dearieme - and villages become towns.
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